§ 1. the history of education, much as it has been hitherto neglected, especially in england, must have a great future before it. if we ignore the past we cannot understand the present, or forecast the future. in this book i am going to speak of reformers or innovators who aimed at changing what was handed down to them; but the radical can no more escape from the past, than the conservative can stereotype it. it acts not by attraction only, but no less by repulsion. there have been thinkers in latter times who have announced themselves as the executioners of the past and laboured to destroy all it has bequeathed to us. they have raised the ferocious cry, “vive la destruction! vive la mort! place à l’avenir! hurrah for destruction! hurrah for death! make room for the world that is to be!” but their very hatred of the past has brought them under the influence of it. “do just the opposite of what has been done and you will do right,” said rousseau; and this rule of negation would make the past regulate the present and the future no less than its opposite, “do always what is usual.”

if we cannot get free from the past in the domain of thought, still less can we in action. custom is to all our[2] activities what the mainspring is to the watch. we may bring forces into play to make the watch go faster or slower, but if we took out the mainspring it would not go at all. for our mainspring we are indebted to the past.

§ 2. in studying the past we must give our special attention to those periods in which the course of ideas takes, as the french say, a new bend.[3] such a period was the renascence. then it was that the latest bend was given to the educational ideal of the civilized world; and though we seem now again to have arrived at a period of change, we are still, perhaps far more than we are aware, affected by the ideas of the great scholars who guided the intellect of europe in the revival of learning.

§ 3. from the beginning to the end of the fifteenth century the balance was trembling between two kinds of culture, and the fate of the schoolboy depended on the result. in this century men first got a correct conception of the globe they were inhabiting. hitherto they had not even professed to have any knowledge of geography; there is no mention of it in the trivium and quadrivium which were then supposed to form the cycle of things known, if not of things knowable. but columbus and vasco da gama were grand teachers of geography, and their lessons were learnt as far as civilization extended.

the impetus thus given to the study of the earth might, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, have engrossed the mind of europe with the material world, had not the leaning to physical science been encountered and overcome by an impulse derived from another discovery. about the[3] time of the discovery of america there also came to light the literatures of greece and rome.

§ 4. when i speak of the discovery of the ancient literatures as rivalling that of america, this use of the word “discovery” may be disputed. it may be urged that though the greek language and literature were unknown in the west of europe till they were brought there by the fugitives after the fall of constantinople in 1453, yet the works of the great latin writers had always been known in italy, and dante declares himself the disciple of virgil. and yet i cannot give up the word “discovery.” in the life of an individual it sometimes happens that he suddenly acquires as it were a new sense. the world around him remains the same as before, but it is not the same to him. a film passes from his eyes, and what has been ordinary and unmeaning suddenly becomes a source of wonder and delight to him. something similar happens at times in the history of the general mind; indeed our own century has seen a remarkable instance of it. in reading the thoughts of great writers of earlier times, we cannot but be struck, not only with their ignorance of the material world, but also with their ignorance of their ignorance. little as they know, they often speak as if they knew everything. newton could see that he was like a child discovering a few shells while the unexplored ocean lay before him; but in those days it required the intellect of a newton to understand this. to the other children the ocean seemed to conceal nothing, and they innocently thought that all the shells, or nearly all, had been picked up. it was reserved for the people of our own century to become aware of the marvels which lie around us in the material world, and to be fascinated by the discovery. if the human race could live through several civilizations without opening its eyes to the[4] wonders of the earth it inhabits, and then could suddenly become aware of them, we may well understand its retaining unheeded the literatures of greece and rome for centuries, and at length as it were discovering them, and turning to them with unbounded enthusiasm and delight.

as students of education we can hardly attach too much importance to this great revolution. for nearly three centuries the curriculum in the public schools of europe remained what the renascence had made it. we have again entered on an age of change, but we are still much influenced by the ideas of the renascence, and the best way to understand the forces now at work is to trace them where possible to their origin. let us then consider what the renascence was, and how it affected the educational system.

§ 5. in endeavouring to understand the renascence, we cannot do better than listen to what mark pattison says of it in his “life of casaubon”:—“in the fifteenth century was revealed to a world which had hitherto been trained to logical analysis, the beauty of literary form. the conception of style or finished expression had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric. it was not the despotic act of justinian in closing the schools of athens which had suppressed it. the sense of art in language decayed from the same general causes which had been fatal to all artistic perception. banished from the roman empire in the sixth century or earlier, the classical conception of beauty of form re-entered the circle of ideas after near a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance. cicero and virgil, livius and ovid, had been there all along, but the idea of composite harmony on which their works were constructed was wanting. the restored conception, as if to recoup itself for its long suppression,[5] took entire possession of the mind of europe. the first period of the renascence passed in adoration of the awakened beauty, and in efforts to copy and multiply it.”

§ 6. here mark pattison speaks as if the conception of beauty of form belonged exclusively to the ancients and those who learnt of them. this seems to require some abatement. there are points in which medi?val art far excelled the art of the renascence. the thirteenth century, as archbishop trench has said, was “rich in glorious creations of almost every kind;” and in that century our great english architect, street, found the root of all that is best in modern art. (see “dublin afternoon lectures,” 1868.)

but there are expressions of beauty to which the greeks, and those who caught their spirit, were keenly alive, and to which the people of the middle age seem to have been blind. the first is beauty in the human form; the second is beauty in literature.

the old delight in beauty in the human form has never come back to us. mr. ruskin tells us we are an ugly race, with ill-shapen limbs, and well pleased with our ugliness and deformity, and in reply we only mutter something about the necessity of clothing both for warmth and decency. but as to the other expression of beauty, beauty in literature, the mind of europe again became conscious of it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. the re-awakening of this sense of beauty we call the renascence.

§ 7. before we consider the effect of this intellectual revolution on education, let us be sure that we are not “paying ourselves with words,” and that we know exactly what we mean by “literature.”

when the conceptions of an individual mind are expressed[6] in a permanent form of words, we get literature. the sum total of all the permanent forms of expression in one language make up the literature of that language; and if no one has given his conceptions a form which has been preserved, the language is without a literature. there are then two things essential to a literary work: first, the conceptions of an individual mind; second, a permanent form of expression. hence it follows that the domain of literature is distinct from the domain of natural or mathematical science. science does not give us the conceptions of an individual mind, but it tells us what every rational person who studies the subject must think. and science is entirely independent of any form of words: a proposition of euclid is science; a sonnet of wordsworth’s is literature. we learn from euclid certain truths which we should have learnt from some one else if euclid had never existed, and the propositions may be conveyed equally well in different forms of words and in any language. but a sonnet of wordsworth’s conveys thought and feeling peculiar to the poet; and even if the same thought and feeling were conveyed to us in other words, we should lose at least half of what he has given us. poetry is indeed only one kind of literature, but it is the highest kind; and what is true of literary works in verse, is true also in a measure of literary works in prose. so great is the difference between science and literature, that in literature, as the first lord lytton said, the best books are generally the oldest; in science they are the newest.

§ 8. at present we are concerned with literature only. there are two ways in which a work of literature may excite our admiration and affect our minds. these are, first, by the beauty of the conceptions it conveys to us; and[7] second, by the beauty of the language in which it conveys them. in the greatest works the two excellences will be combined.[4]

now the literary taste proper fastens especially on the second of the two, i.e., on beauty of expression; and the renascence was the revival of literary taste. “it was,” as mark pattison says, “the conception of style or finished expression which had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric, and which re-entered the circle of ideas after a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance.” if we lose sight of this, we shall be perplexed by the unbounded enthusiasm which we find in the sixteenth century for the old classics. what great evangel, we may ask, had cicero and virgil and ovid, or even plato and the greek dramatists, for men who lived when europe had experienced a thousand years of christianity? the answer is simple. they had none whatever. their thoughts and conceptions were not adapted to the wants of the new world. the civilization of the christian nations of the sixteenth century was a very different thing from the civilization of greece and rome. it had its own thoughts, its own problems, its own wants. the old-world thoughts could not be thought over again by it. this indeed was felt though not admitted by the renascence scholars themselves. had it been the thoughts of the ancients which seemed to them so valuable they would have made some effort to diffuse those thoughts in the languages of the modern world. much as a great literary work loses by translation, there may still be enough left of it to be a[8] source of instruction and delight. the thoughts of aristotle, conveyed in a latin translation of an arabic translation, profoundly affected the mind of europe in the middle ages. the bible, or book par excellence, is known to few indeed in its original form. some great writers—cervantes, and shakespeare, and the author of the “arabian nights”—please and instruct nations who know not the sound of the languages wherein their works are composed. if then the great writers of greece and rome had been valued for their matter, their works would have been translated by the renascence scholars as the bible was translated by the reformers, and the history of modern education would have taken a very different turn from that which awaited it. but it was not so. the renascence scholars did all they could to discourage translations. for the grand discovery which we call the revival of learning was, not that the ancients had something to say, but that whatever they had to say they knew how to say it.

§ 9. and thus it happens that in the period of change, when europe was re-arranging its institutions, developing new ideas and settling into new grooves of habit, we find the men most influential in education entirely fascinated by beauty of expression, and this in two ancient languages, so that the one thing needful for the young seemed to them an introduction to the study of ancient writings. the inevitable consequence was this: education became a mere synonym for instruction in latin and greek. the only ideal set up for the “educated” was the classical scholar.

§ 10. perhaps the absurdity of taking this ideal, an ideal which is obviously fitted for a small class of men only, and proposing it for general adoption, was partly concealed from the renascence scholars by the peculiar circumstances[9] of their age. no doubt they thought literature would in the future be a force capable of much wider application than it had ever been before. true, literature had till then affected a small class only. literature meant books, books meant mss., and mss. were rare and costly. literature, the embodiment of grand thoughts in grand words, had existed before letters, or at least without letters. the homeric poems, for example, had been known to thousands who could not read or write. but beauty of expression naturally got associated and indeed confounded with the art by which it was preserved; so the creations of the mind, when embodied in particular combinations of words, acquired the name of literature or letters, and became almost exclusively the affair of those who had opportunities of study, opportunities afforded only to the few. during the middle ages every one who could read was allowed his “privilege of clergy;” that is, he was assumed to be a clergyman. literature then was not thought of as a means of instruction. but at the very time that the beauty of the ancient writings dawned on the mind of europe, a mechanical invention seemed to remove all hindrances to the spread of literature. the scholars seized on the printing press and thought by means of it to give all “the educated” a knowledge of classics.

§ 11. we cannot help speculating what would have been the effect of the discovery of printing if it had been made at another time. as there may be literature without books, so there may be books without literature. if at the time of the invention of printing there had been no literature, no creations of individual minds embodied in permanent forms of speech, books might have been used as apparatus in a mental gymnasium, or they might have been made the[10] means of conveying information. but just then the intellect of europe was tired of mental gymnastics. it had taken exercise in the trivium like a squirrel in its revolving cage, and was vexed to find it made no progress.[5] as for information there was little to be had. the age of observation and of physical science was not yet. so the printing press was entirely at the service of the new passion for literature and the scholars dreamed of the general diffusion of literary culture by means of printed books.

§ 12. for some two centuries the literary spirit had supreme control over the intellect of europe, and the literary spirit could then find satisfaction nowhere but in the study of the ancient classics. the natural consequence was that throughout this period the “educated man” was supposed to be identified with the classical scholar. the great rival of the literary spirit, the scientific spirit which cares for nothing but sequences independent of the human mind, began to show itself early in the seventeenth century: its first great champion was francis bacon. but by this time the school course of study had been settled, and two centuries had to elapse before the scientific spirit could unsettle it again. even now when we speak of a man as “well-educated” we are commonly understood to mean that in his youth he was taught the two classical languages.

§ 13. the taking of the classical scholar as the only[11] ideal of the educated man has been a fruitful source of evil in the history of education.

i. this ideal exalted the learner above the doer. as far back as xenophon, we find a contest between the passive ideal and the active, between the excellence which depends on a knowledge of what others have thought and done and the excellence which comes of thinking and doing. but the excellence derived from learning had never been highly esteemed. to be able to repeat homer’s poetry was regarded in greece as we now regard a pleasing accomplishment; but the dignity of the learned man as such was not within the range of greek ideas. many of the romans after they began to study greek literature certainly piqued themselves on being good greek scholars, and cicero occasionally quotes with all the airs of a pedant; but so thoroughly was the contrary ideal, the ideal of the doer, established at rome, that nobody ever dreamt of placing its rival above it. in the decline of the empire, especially at alexandria, we find for the first time honours paid to the learned man; but he was soon lost sight of again. at the renascence he burst into sudden blaze, and it was then discovered that he was what every man would wish to be. thus the renascence scholars, notwithstanding their admiration of the great nations of antiquity, set up an ideal which those nations would heartily have despised. the schoolmaster very readily adopted this ideal; and schools have been places of learning, not training, ever since.

§ 14. ii. the next defect i observe in the renascence ideal is this: it attributes to literature more direct power over common life than literature has ever had, or is ever likely to have.

i say direct power, for indirectly literature is one of the[12] grand forces which act on all of us; but it acts on us through others, its most important function being to affect great intellects, the minds of those who think out and act out important changes. its direct action on the mass of mankind is after all but insignificant. we have seen that literature consists in permanent forms of words, expressing the conceptions of individual minds; and these forms will be studied only by those who are interested in the conceptions or find pleasure in the mode in which they are expressed. now the vast majority of ordinary people are without these inducements to literary study. they take a keen interest in everything connected with their relations and intimate friends, and a weaker interest in the thinkings and sayings and doings of every one else who is personally known to them; but as to the mental conceptions of those who lived in other times, or if now alive are not known even by sight, the ordinary person is profoundly indifferent to them; and of course delight in expression, as such, is out of the question. the natural consequence is that the habit of reading books is by no means common. mark pattison observes that there are few books to be found in most english middle-class homes, and he says: “the dearth of books is only the outward and visible sign of the mental torpor which reigns in those destitute regions” (see “fortnightly review,” november, 1877). i much doubt if he would have found more books in the middle-class homes of the continent. there is only one kind of reading that is nearly universal—the reading of newspapers; and the newspaper lacks the element of permanence, and belongs to the domain of talk rather than of literature.

even when we get among the so-called “educated,” we find that those who care for literature form a very small[13] minority. the rest have of course read shakespeare and milton and walter scott and tennyson, but they do not read them. the lion’s share of our time and thoughts and interests must be given to our business or profession, whatever that may be; and in few instances is this connected with literature. for the rest, whatever time or thought a man can spare from his calling is mostly given to his family, or to society, or to some hobby which is not literature.

and love of literature is not shown in such reading as is common. the literary spirit shows itself, as i said, in appreciating beauty of expression, and how far beauty of expression is cared for we may estimate from the fact that few people think of reading anything a second time. the ordinary reader is profoundly indifferent about style, and will not take the trouble to understand ideas. he keeps to periodicals or light fiction, which enables the mind to loll in its easy chair (so to speak) and see pass before it a series of pleasing images. an idea, as mark pattison says, “is an excitant, comes from mind and calls forth mind; an image is a sedative;” and most people when they take up a book are seeking a sedative.

so literature is after all a very small force in the lives of most men, and perhaps even less in the lives of most women. why then are the employments of the school-room arranged on the supposition that it is the grand force of all? the reason is, that we have inherited from the renascence a false notion of the function of literature.

§ 15. iii. i must now point out a fault in the renascence ideal which is perhaps the most remarkable of all. those by whom this ideal was set up were entirely possessed by an enthusiasm for literature, and they made the mistake[14] of attributing to literature a share in general culture which literature seems incapable of taking. after this we could little have expected that the new ideal would exclude literature from the schoolroom, and yet so it has actually turned out.

as a literary creation contains the conceptions of an individual mind expressed in a permanent form of words, it exists only for those who can understand the words or at least the conceptions.

from this it follows that literature for the young must have its expression in the vernacular. the instances are rare indeed in which any one below the age of fifteen or sixteen (perhaps i might put the limit a year or two higher) understands any but the mother tongue. in the mother tongue indeed some forms of literature exercise a great influence over young minds. ballad literature seems especially to belong to youth, the youth of nations and of individuals. aristotle educated alexander with homer; and we can easily imagine the effect which the iliad must have had on the young greeks. although in the days of plato instruction was not confined to literature, he gives this account of part of the training in the athenian schools: “placing the pupils on benches, the instructors make them read and learn by heart the poems of good poets in which are many moral lessons, many tales and eulogies and lays of the brave men of old; that the boys may imitate them with emulation and strive to become such themselves.” here we see a very important function attributed to literature in the bringing up of the young; but the literature so used must obviously be in the language of the learners.

the influence of a literary work may, however, extend itself far beyond the limits of its own language. when our minds[15] can receive and take pleasure in the conceptions of a great writer, he may speak to us by an interpreter. at the renascence there were books in the world which might have affected the minds of the young—plutarch, herodotus, and above all homer. but, as i have already said, it was not the conceptions, but the literary form of the ancients, which seemed to the renascence scholars of such inestimable value, so they refused to give the conceptions in any but the original words. “studying the ancients in translations,” says melancthon, “is merely looking at the shadow.” he could not have made a greater mistake. as far as the young are concerned the truth is exactly the reverse. the translation would give the substance: the original can give nothing but the shadow. let us take the experience of mr. kinglake, the author of “eothen.” this distinguished eton man, fired by his remembrances of homer, visited the troad. he had, as he tells us, “clasped the iliad line by line to his brain with reverence as well as love.” well done, eton! we are tempted to exclaim when we read this passage: here at least is proof that some literature was taught in those days of the dominion of the classics. but stop! it seems that this clasping did not take place at eton, but in happy days before eton, when kinglake knew no greek and read translations. “heroic days are these,” he writes, “but the dark ages of schoolboy life come closing over them. i suppose it’s all right in the end: yet, by jove! at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall.... the dismal change is ordained and thin meagre latin (the same for everybody) with small shreds and patches of greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile monkish doggrel, grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, horrible odds and ends of dead[16] languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall from roman story to a three-inch scrap of ‘scriptores romani’—from greek poetry down, down, to the cold rations of ‘poet? gr?ci,’ cut up by commentators and served out by schoolmasters!” (“eothen,” the troad.)

we see from this how the renascence ideal had the extraordinary effect of banishing literature from the school-room. literature has indeed not ceased to influence the young; it still counts for much more in their lives than in the lives of their seniors; but we all know who are the writers who affected our own minds in childhood and youth, and who affect the minds of our pupils now—not eutropius or xenophon, or c?sar or cicero, but defoe and swift and marryatt and walter scott. the ancient writings which were literature to melancthon and erasmus, as they are still to many in our universities and elsewhere, can never be literature to the young. most of the classical authors read in the schoolroom could not be made literature to young people even by means of translations, for they were men who wrote for men and women only. we see that it would be absurd to make an ordinary boy of twelve or fourteen study burke or pope. and if we do not make him read burke, whose language he understands, why do we make him read cicero whose language he does not understand? if he cannot appreciate pope, why do we teach him horace? the renascence gives us the explanation of this singular anomaly. the scholars of that age were so delighted with the “composite harmony” of the ancient classics that the study of these classics seemed to them the one thing worth living for. the main, if not the only object they kept in view in bringing up the young was to gain for them admission to the treasure house; and though young people could not understand the[17] ancient writings as literature, they might at least study them as language and thus be ready to enjoy them as literature in after-life. thus the subject of instruction in the schoolroom came to be, not the classics but, the classical languages. the classics were used as school books, but the only meaning thought of was the meaning of the detached word or at best of the detached sentence. you ask a child learning to read if he understands what he is reading about, and he says, “i can’t think of the meaning because i am thinking of the words.” the same thing happened in the schoolboy’s study of the classics, and so it has come to pass that to this day the great writers of antiquity discharge a humble function which they certainly never contemplated.

“great c?sar’s body dead and turned to clay

may stop a hole to keep the wind away.”

and great c?sar’s mind has been turned to uses almost as paltry. he has in fact written for the schoolroom not a commentary on the wars of gaul—nothing of the kind—but simply a book of exercises in latin construing; and an excellent book it would be if he had only graduated the difficulties better.

§ 16. iv. there is yet another weakness about the renascence ideal—a weakness from which most ideals are free.

most ideals have this merit at least, that he who makes even a feeble and abortive attempt to reach them is benefited in proportion to his advance, however small that advance may be. if he fails to seize the coat of gold, he carries away, as the proverb tells us, at least one of the sleeves; or, to use george herbert’s metaphor—

“ ... who aimeth at the sky,

shoots higher far than he who means a tree.”

[18]

but the learned ideal has not even this advantage. the first stage, the study of the ancient languages, is so totally different from the study of the ancient literatures to which it is the preliminary, that the student who never goes beyond this first stage either gets no benefit at all, or a benefit which is not of the kind intended. suppose i am within a walk, though a long one, of the british museum, and hearing of some valuable books in the library, which i can see nowhere else, i set off to consult them. in this case it makes no difference to me how valuable the books are if i do not get as far as the museum.[6] my friends may comfort me with the assurance that the walk must have done me good. perhaps so; but i left home to get a knowledge of certain books, not to exercise my legs. had exercise been my object i should probably have chosen another direction.

now schoolmasters, since the renascence, have been in the habit of leading all their pupils through the back slums of the seven dials and soho in the direction of the british museum, with the avowed purpose of taking them to the library, although they knew full well that not one pupil in ten, not one in fifty, would ever reach the door. to produce a few scholars able to appreciate the classics of greece and rome they have sacrificed everybody else; and according to their own showing they have condemned a large portion of the upper classes, nearly all the middle classes, and quite all the poorer classes to remain “uneducated.” and, according to the theory of the schoolroom, one-half of the[19] human race—the women—have not been supposed to need education. for them “accomplishments” have been held sufficient.

§ 17. v. in conclusion i must point out one effect of the renascence ideal which seems to me no less mischievous than those i have already mentioned. this ideal led the schoolmasters to attach little importance to the education of children. directly their pupils were old enough for latin grammar the schoolmasters were quite at home; but till then the children’s time seemed to them of small value, and they neither knew nor cared to know how to employ it. if the little ones could learn by heart forms of words which would afterwards “come in useful,” the schoolmasters were ready to assist such learning by unsparing application of the rod, but no other learning seemed worthy even of a caning. absorbed in the world of books they overlooked the world of nature. galileo complains that he could not induce them to look through his telescope, for they held that truth could be arrived at only by comparison of mss. no wonder then that they had so little sympathy with children, and did not know how to teach them. it is by slow degrees that we are breaking away from the bad tradition then established, are getting to understand children, and with such leaders as rousseau, pestalozzi, and froebel, are investigating the best education for them. we no longer think of them as immature men and women, but see that each stage has its own completeness, and that there is a perfection in childhood which must precede the perfection of manhood just as truly as the flower goes before the fruit. “childhood,” says rousseau, “has its own ways of seeing, feeling, thinking;” and it is by studying these that we find out how children should be educated. our connexion with the world of[20] nature seems much closer in our early years than ever afterwards. the child’s mind seems drawn out to its surroundings. he is intensely interested in the new world in which he finds himself, and whilst so many of us grown people need a flapper, like the sages of laputa, to call our attention from our own thoughts to anything that meets the eye or ear, the child sees and hears everything, and everything seen or heard becomes associated in his mind not so much with thought as with feeling. hence it is that we most of us look back wistfully to our early days, and confess sorrowfully that though years may have brought “the philosophic mind,”

“ ... nothing can bring back the hour

of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.”

the material world then seems to supply just those objects, whether birds, beasts, or flowers, by which the child is attracted, and on which his faculties will therefore be most naturally and healthily employed. but the renascence schoolmasters had little notion of this. if you think that the greatest scholar is the greatest man, you will, as a matter of course, place at the other end of the scale those who are not scholars at all. an english inspector, who seems to have thought children had been created with due regard to the revised code of the privy council, spoke of the infants who could not be classed by their performances in “the three r’s” as “the fag end of the school;” and no doubt the renascence schoolmasters considered the children the fag end of humanity. the great scholars were indeed far above the race of pedants; but the schoolmasters who adopted their ideal were not. and what is a pedant? “a man who has got rid of his brains to make room for his[21] learning.”[7] the pedantic schoolmasters of the renascence wished the mind of the pupil to be cleared of everything else, that it might have room for the languages of greece and rome. but what if the mind failed to take in its destined freight? in that case the schoolmasters had nothing else for it, and were content that it should go empty.